A/N: This story begins the summer before the Marauder’s seventh year. Although Voldemort has been gaining power for quite some time, this is the start of the war, so only people like Dumbledore, who’ve been watching Voldemort for a while, will fully understand what’s going on at first.

This is also my first new story in a while. Let me know what you think!

Lily Evans always wanted a cat. A kitten was the first Christmas present she could remember asking for. She had been given a narrow, white, ceramic pot filled with dirt and a promise from her mother that soon a beautiful lily flower would bloom instead. Lily still had that pot. She kept it on her desk. With red paint, Lily had carefully written her name up the pot in sloppy, childish letters, years ago. The paint had cracked from spending years in the sun, but Lily didn’t mind. She liked the veins running through her name like water parting dirt. And the same orange lily still bloomed from that pot. Only when Lily turned eleven did her family understand how a flower could bloom for years without wilting, even if Lily herself had known for years.

Lily was a witch. Not an ugly, wicked witch like children dressed up as for Halloween; Lily was pretty and kind. But she wanted a cat, like Muggle witches were always shown with, even it wasn’t black. She asked for one every year, until she was old enough to understand what her father being deathly allergic to cats meant. Since then, she contented herself with posters and pictures and drawings. Her favorite poster hung on the ceiling over her bed, five kittens—calico, white, tiger, black, and spotted—played with balls of different colored yarn. After returning from her first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Lily put a charm on that poster to make the cats meow and move. Her parents had been so impressed that she hadn’t been punished after receiving an official warning from the Improper Use of Magic Office reminding her that it was forbidden for underage wizards and witches to use magic outside of school.

Perhaps it was because she never got punished, or maybe it was to annoy her sister for calling her “freak,” but Lily continued to use magic over the summers, until the summer before her sixth year, when she received a letter from the Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, informing her that one more incident of non-essential magic over the holidays from her would require him to take action. Lily had been too embarrassed to show that letter to her parents, so she hid it in her pillowcase and kept her wand in her trunk for the rest of the summer.

Now, it was summer again. Lily was home with her parents for the last summer before she graduated. She was seventeen, and allowed to do magic, but now that she was overage, her desire to do magic over the holidays had greatly diminished. Probably because the thrill of doing something she knew she shouldn’t was gone. Or because her magic-hating sister, Petunia, was spending time with her fiancée, a man named Vernon Dursley—whose blubbery body and large mustache made him look more like a walrus than a man, in Lily’s opinion, at least—and so was not at home to be freaked out by Lily’s magic.

But with Petunia out of the house, all Lily had to do was lie on her bed and watch her five cats play. Puck, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed. Her cats. She could have had a cat at school, her friend Margaret offered to take care of it over the summer, but Lily didn’t want to risk all the cat fur she would end up bringing home. A cat, as much as she wanted one, wasn’t worth jeopardizing her father. So she watched her cats chase yarn and wrestle, meow and prepare to pounce.

Maybe she would get to her homework sometime in August, but for now, she would stare at the ceiling and pretend. And wait for Potter’s letter, she remembered with a groan. Ever since she met Potter, she couldn’t stand him. He was arrogant, immature, overconfident, a jerk to everyone except his best friends, a monster to her ex-best friend, and never stopped asking her out. And every summer, no less than three owls arrived from him. She read the first two in the summer before her second year, but immediately trashed the rest and never replied. Those two letters she had read only proved that Potter was no different at home than at school.

Thinking about Potter made Lily think about her ex-best friend, Severus Snape. He didn’t live far from the Evans’ house and they had met when they were six, Severus even told Lily that she was a witch, and had inseparable since then. Until they went to Hogwarts and they were separated; Severus was sorted into Slytherin while Lily ended up in Gryffindor with Potter and his friends. She had always had a partner in double Potions with Slytherins though, until fifth year. Even before then, Lily knew that Severus had an unhealthy passion for the Dark Arts, and that he was quick to make friends Lily thought were downright creepy. But Lily could overlook that. Severus was her friend, her first and best friend. Until he called her a ‘Mudblood,’ and she realized his life filled with the Dark Arts had no room for her. He insisted he hadn’t meant it, but Lily couldn’t believe him. Severus had been the one to explain how awful that word was, and he had used it before, she knew. She had heard him call other Muggleborns ‘Mudblood,’ just not her. Using the name to mean her was just the last straw that broke their friendship, which had been a dying camel since first year.

Lily would be lying if she said she didn’t miss Severus, though. Not the Severus she knew now, but the Severus who told her about magic and picked dandelions with her. This new Severus scared her. Near the end of last term, Severus had cornered her in the library, out of breath and with a crazy gleam in his black eyes.

“I’ve got them, Lily! Black’s so stupid! He didn’t even know I was there. But now I know how to get them all expelled. Think about it, a Hogwarts without Potter and Black.”

He had been gripping her shoulders, holding her against a large bookshelf, and when she told him to let go, he only continued on about how he was going to find out where Potter and his friends disappeared to every month, gripping her harder.

“Severus, you’re hurting me!”

But he hadn’t listened or hadn’t cared.

“I know you want them gone just as much as I do, and I can do it, Lily! Dumbledore will have to listen.”

A flash of purple light and Severus was on the floor, staring at Lily in shock as she stuffed her wand back in her robes, grabbed her books, and fled the library.

Sure, she hated Potter and Black, but she didn’t think it was right to go around plotting to get them all expelled. And no matter what Severus had been trying to tell her, he had terrified her that night. Did he really think that display in the library would win her friendship and trust back? She hoped not.

Crash!

Lily bolted up at the sound of a large amount of glass shattering. Then laid back down, rolling her eyes at her jumpiness. Her parents always watched t.v. with the volume nearly maxed.

But the screams… The screams were eerily real to be coming from the telly. And that was her father, shouting, “Get out!”

Lily wrenched open her trunk and grasped the thin piece of wood lying on the top. The stairs were out of view from the back door, the glass door. She could get down the stairs without the intruder noticing her, stun them, and she and her parents could get away. If this was a Muggle burglar, they wouldn’t stand a chance against Lily’s magic. If this was one of the Dark wizards Professor Dumbledore had warned the students about last year, well, she could still surprise them.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

An owl? An owl! An owl was her chance to send for help. She threw open the window, ripped the parchment off, scribbled ‘HELP’ with the first pen she found, and sent the owl off with her letter. With her parents screaming downstairs, whoever came didn’t matter.

She clutched her wand to her chest until she got to the last stair.

“Avada Kedavra!”

Lily’s heart stopped. Her mother screamed. That meant her father was… No. She would save her mother.

“Where is your Mudblood daughter?”

“I told you,” Lily heard her mother sob, “my children aren’t home.”

She took a breath, and prepared to jump out from behind the corner, surprise the intruder and stun him.

But a hand over her mouth and an arm around her waist stopped her.

“Shh, I won’t hurt you, but we have to get out of here,” a familiar voice whispered.

Lily struggled against his hold. She had to get to her mother.

“Avada Kedavra!”

She went limp. This idiot stopped her from saving her mother.

“Before they start looking, we have to go.”

Lily only half-fought to return to her house as Severus dragged her away. The last part of the house she saw was a new addition: A hideous skull with a snake coming out of its mouth hovering over her home.